The Proof of Innocence

A UCSD physicist was able to argue his way out of a traffic ticket with a bit of audacity and four pages worth of complex mathematics.

Dmitri Krioukov, a senior research scientist at the University of California, San Diego, was issued a ticket for failing to completely stop at a stop sign. Rather than eat the $400 charge, Krioukov decided to fight, producing a four page paper entitled “The Proof of Innocence,” arguing that it was physically impossible for him to violate the law.

It worked.

"The judge was convinced, and the officer was convinced as well," Krioukov told PhysicsCentral.

By emphasizing the difference between linear and angular velocity, Krioukov argued that what the police officer witnessed was actually an illusion inconsistent with reality. It’s the same reason why trains seem to move slowly when they’re far away but then speed up when they’re close -- even when the actual velocity has remained constant.

“Therefore my argument in the court went as follows: that what he saw would be easily confused by the angle of speed of this hypothetical object that failed to stop at the stop sign. And therefore, what he saw did not properly reflect reality, which was completely different," Krioukov told NBC San Diego.

Krioukov has since uploaded his paper online (pdf), describing it in his abstract as “a way to fight your traffic tickets.”

“The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California.”

The writer asserts that the observations of the Officer were obstructed so that he could not have distinguished whether or not the observed interval of deceleration followed by acceleration at a similar rate was inclusive of zero velocity at the required stop point.

If the premises are granted the argument suffices to establish nonprovabilty of guilt.

If the Officer acknowledged presence of another car in the critical place at the critical moment the defendant could have simply said OK there was a car blocking your view so you couldn't have seen whether I stopped completely or not.

If the Officer were to have said that nothing had blocked his view of the defendant failing to stop completely for the stop sign the case would been word against word.

You post something that you only read half of AND if has already been posted in the last couple of days???

This guy most likely had his ticket dismissed (we presume he is being honest ) not because he proved his case, but because the judge called it good enough. I have seen tickets get dismissed by judges based simply on the fact of how much time the person went through in an attempt to show they were not guilty of whatever moving violation they were cited for.

The article never says the cop agreed a vehicle blocked his view, that was a claim by the author of the article. Plenty of people in court say this and that, but rarely are they correct.

I have seen tickets get dismissed by judges based simply on the fact of how much time the person went through in an attempt to show they were not guilty of whatever moving violation they were cited for.

I have seen tickets dismissed by judges that just happened to think the excuse was funny....

And above all else...it cost them their time and their dime, while it paid me time and a half with a minimum two hour pay out.

this.
I'd gladly have every one I write a ticket to contest them. Each one is traffic court to the tune of 4 hours min. BTW, I've seen the judge in my traffic court dismiss my ticket simply because the citizen was over 50, and at that age, I guess in the judge's mind, the violator could not have been guilty. So I really don't look at it as any sort of credible reflection on my quality of work.

Yep, I cite em and I arrest em, what the prosecutor, the judge and the public defender decide to do with them is society's problem as they continue to elect the two of them to their positions.

I even had a judge dismiss tickets for a particular offense because he thought "it was a stupid rule." Whatever, just make sure I get my OT check. Does it suck, sure, nobody like to lose, but I quit letting it bother me many, many years ago.